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In an ironic and diabolic move to generate advertising revenue to support its journalistic mission, MotherJones.com recently launched a series of ads on its site to encourage users to willingly disclose personal information on consumer habits in an online user survey. Even more shocking, these ads tout that users who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing to win some really cool prizes donated by advertising sponsors Aveda and Patagonia.

When questioned about this blatant attempt to learn more about its website visitors, Associate Publisher of Sales & Marketing, Suzanne Saluti was quoted as saying, “We don’t intend to release personal, individual user information to anyone. We will merely aggregate the data and share those results with the advertising community in order to generate online ad sales to off-set the costs associated with providing in-depth investigative reporting on the site.”

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